I heard a take on this, which suggests price is more a measure of the value of labor rather than the cost of materials. Under more historical economic models, you were limited by your immediate regional supply of a good or service. And we would talk about shortages, droughts, and famines when the local supply was exhausted. The local labor force couldn't produce more commodities with the tools/conditions at hand, so they exhausted them.

Under a more modern market system, we no longer talk about "running out" of a given commodity. Instead, we talk about the price going beyond what we have available to pay. You'll walk into the grocery store and see a $10 banana. And it'll sit on the shelf till it rots, because nobody has $10 to spend on a banana. But it's only there because nobody can pay that price. The fact that there's no second banana in the stock room is obscured by the astronomically high price on display.

However, you do eventually get to the point where people need the commodity more than they need the currency. That is, in effect, the cause of inflation. And then the banana gets sold, there's no second banana, and we reveal the real cost of materials in their absence. There's no supply chain bringing in more bananas because we've experienced a structural failure in the economy. The cost of maintaining infrastructure eclipsed what the owners/administrators were willing to front. We obscured it with a price signal until the bitter end.

And the empty shelves ultimately reveal what national administrators believe to be the value of the local population. It is not a question of commodity markets any longer, but of labor markets. You (the local public) aren't worth sending new supplies to, because we (the capitalist economic administrators) no longer consider you productive laborers.